Earl Good: The Vice Lord Killer Who Lost His Family, Killed 5 People, and Never Came Home 

 

 

 

Illinois River Correctional Center, downstate Illinois, the last publicly available institutional record from 2023 places Earl Good, their IDOC number C66268, age 76, still incarcerated. He first entered the Illinois juvenile system at age 12. He spent the majority of his life under state supervision or incarceration, most people’s entire adult lives and then some.

 He never came home. In the fall of 1975, over 39 days, Earl Good and one other man killed five people across Chicago and East St. Louis. A 73-year-old blind man beaten to death on South Calumet. Two men shot execution-style in the back room of a tavern on Pulaski. Two store owners killed behind the counter of a grocery in a city the rest of the country had already given up on.

Five people, 39 days, then the arrest, then the sentence, 90 to 180 years. Earl Good was 28 years old. By the time he did all of that, he had already spent more than half his life inside state institutions. The state of Illinois first took custody of him around age 12 for behavioral issues, for running away, for being a child nobody knew what to do with.

This video is not about whether Earl Good was dangerous. He was. Five people are dead. It is about how a boy from North Lawndale becomes the man who does that and whether every institution the state built to stop it made it more likely instead. Every address he ever had was on a transfer slip, every one. The last documented one points to a cell in Illinois River Correctional Center.

Whether there is a final transfer slip or just a death record or nothing at all is not in any public file. That is where the paper trail ends. North Lawndale, Chicago. The Vice Lords would later call it Holy City, not because it was safe, but because it was theirs. Earl Good was born there on June 4th, 1947 into a neighborhood the city of Chicago had been designing to fail for a decade before he arrived.

 His mother was Lucille Good, seven children. His father left when Earl was approximately 3 years old. After that, Lucille kept having children, four more no fathers present the family on state assistance. Seven children in an apartment the landlord had not repaired since the building was constructed.

 That is the house Earl Good grew up in. That is the first institution the state of Illinois handed him to not by paperwork, just by geography, an accident of birth. Think about what that apartment looks like in 1950. Families in North Lawndale were sleeping on living room floors heated by cast iron stoves dating to the 19th century. Rats and roaches were standard.

 Many families could not afford three meals a day. The older children, the ones old enough to understand that nobody was coming, were set loose to figure it out. Earl Good was one of those children. He started running before anyone issued him a case number. In the mid-1950s, blockbusting hit North Lawndale hard. Real estate speculators moved block by block manufacturing white flight reselling properties to black families newly arrived from Mississippi at above market prices on buildings nobody was going to fix.

Sharecropping families who had never navigated urban housing suddenly owned contracts on apartments with broken boilers. Slumlords collected rent and disappeared. The neighborhood was being asset stripped in real time and the people inside it had no legal mechanism to stop it. By the mid-1950s, heroin had begun to move into West Side neighborhoods like North Lawndale adding another layer of instability to a community already being hollowed out from the outside.

By the time Earl Good was old enough to understand the street, the street had already been reshaped by forces that came from somewhere else and left the damage behind. Earl Good ran. That was his response to all of it. He ran away from school. He ran away from home. His mother could not hold him and the state had not yet decided it was their problem.

He was a boy loose in a neighborhood in free fall. No father, six siblings, a mother doing the math every week on what the assistance check covered and what it did not. Nobody issued a transfer slip for North Lawndale. You were just born there. The state decided it was their problem around 1958. Earl Good was around 11 or 12 years old classified as truant and incorrigible.

The state had a place for boys like that on the far North Side, 50 acres, about as far from North Lawndale as you could get without leaving Chicago. They called it the Chicago Parental School, a state-issued family. Every one of his brothers and sisters died before him. Lucille died before him. He outlasted all of them, not free, not home, just still alive inside a number cell while everyone he started with was gone. That is North Lawndale.

 That is where it begins. The Chicago Parental School sat on 50 acres on Foster Avenue on the far north side, miles from North Lawndale, which was the point. The name was not an accident. The theory was literal. If a boy’s family had failed him, the state would substitute its own. Married couples were hired to live inside each of the 10 residential cottages, 35 boys per cottage, one couple per cottage, playing mother and father for children the court had committed without requiring parental consent. Military drills, uniforms,

routine, the model said, “Structure is what these boys are missing. Give them structure and they will come back corrected.” This is when the first transfer slip activates. Someone signed a document that said where Earl Good was going and who authorized it. It listed the reason truancy and corrigibility. It did not ask whether the receiving institution had any actual ability to fix what it had been handed.

 The transfer slip never asked that. It just says, “Where you’re going next.” Earl Good ran away from the Parental School repeatedly. The city’s answer to a boy who kept running from a substitute two family was a place with real fences. In 1959, they sent him to St. Charles, the Illinois State Training School for boys 60 miles west of Chicago in Kane County.

Earl Good was 12 years old. Here’s the detail I need you to hold. The Vice Lords were founded at St. Charles, not on a street corner in North Lawndale, Not in a parking lot or a park. Inside that reformatory in 1957 and 1958 one and two years before Good arrived a cohort of North Lawndale teenagers led by a boy named Edwin Papillo.

Perry started the gang that would eventually become the Almighty Vice Lord Nation. They were inmates. They built it inside an institution the state of Illinois was running. By the time Earl Good walked in the founding members were cycling back to North Lawndale to establish street chapters. Good arrived just as the institutional blueprint was spreading outward into the neighborhood he came from.

I’m not saying the state sent him to a Vice Lord recruitment office. I’m saying the state sent him to the institution where the Vice Lords were founded and then he went back to the neighborhood where the Vice Lords lived and then he became a Vice Lord. The pipeline has a very specific shape. They transferred him to Sheridan in May of 1960.

The Illinois Industrial School for Boys at Sheridan was worse than St. Charles. Farther downstate higher security older boys. They sent him because he’d become too difficult for St. Charles to manage. Released July 1961, arrested October 1961 for attempting to steal money from another boy. Back to St.

 Charles, released April 1962, back to Sheridan after another violent incident. Released February 1963, back inside again by late 1963. Released July 1964 at age 17. Five placements, seven years. And at every stage the state’s answer to the boy who kept running was a facility with taller fences and harder lessons. Each transfer slip signed with the same institutional logic, the last place didn’t work, so try the next one.

Nobody paused between St. Charles and Sheridan to ask whether the sequence itself was the problem. The substitute family lasted 17 years, then the state stopped paying for it. The parental school closed in 1975, the same year Earl Good was released from adult prison. The buildings on Foster Avenue were knocked down.

Northeastern Illinois University is there now. Earl Good outlasted it. He outlasted most of the institutions that processed him in the specific way that a man with a 2058 max out date outlasts things, not by winning, just by staying alive inside the next building on the list. February 1965. Earl Good is 17 years old.

 He has stabbed a man to death in an argument. The court convicts him of manslaughter and sends him to adult prison. He will not be released for 10 and a half years. What happens in those 10 and a half years is the part of this story that I cannot stop thinking about. The transfer slip from the juvenile system to the adult penitentiary is the biggest institutional handoff in Earl Good’s life.

Every previous slip said in its bureaucratic way that the state was still trying to correct something. This one doesn’t say that. This one says sentenced. There’s a difference. The state has stopped pretending the next institution will fix him. Now the transfer is just a destination. And while Earl Good is at that destination, something extraordinary happens in North Lawndale.

 In September 1967, the Conservative Vice Lords incorporated as a non-profit. They received a $15,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. With it, they opened a clothing store on 16th Street called African Lion. They ran a recreation center called Teen Town at 16th and Lawndale open April 4th, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr.

 was shot in Memphis. They built an art gallery. They ran an employment agency. A man named David Dawley, a former Peace Corps operative brought in by Trans-Century Corporation, later described the CVLs organizational capacity this way, “He really understood the psychology of gangs and how you could channel that organizational skill they had.

” In 1969 and 1970, Rockefeller awarded them an additional $275,000. In 1970, a documentary about the Vice Lords’ transformation filmed from inside called Lord Thing won a silver medal at the Venice Film Festival. The gang that processed Earl Good at St. Charles was for a few years running an art gallery and winning at Venice.

Earl Good was imprisoned for all of it. The leader of the community phase was a man named Frederick Douglass “Gore” Bobby Gore. He had not founded the Vice Lords, but he had built the legitimate arm of it. He walked with Martin Luther King Jr. He negotiated with city officials. He is the reason the Rockefeller money came.

In 1969, Bobby Gore was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years. After his imprisonment, the Vice Lords openly reverted to street violence. By the early 1970s, government funding had dried up, the positive leaders had been killed, jailed, or moved away, and Mayor Daley’s war on gangs had finished off what prosecution hadn’t.

CVL Inc. was over. The art gallery was closed. Teen Town was shuttered. He missed it by a decade. He came home to the aftermath. July 1975, Earl Good walks out of prison at 28 years old. His mother is gone. His siblings are gone. His father has been gone since he was three. He has spent more than half his life inside state institutions.

 The community era, the Vice Lords built the One Window, where the gang he belonged to was trying to be something else, had opened and closed entirely while he was inside. He came home to a neighborhood that had tried to change and been broken for trying. The buildings on 16th Street, the clothing store, the art gallery, the recreation center, were closed, converted, or just empty.

 The men who built them were in prison or dead. What was left was what was always left when the legitimate alternatives collapsed the corners, the crew, the only community the state had ever placed him in. North Lawndale in 1975 had been through a decade of federal abandonment, gang war, and the slow bleeding out of every institution that had tried to hold it together.

Earl Good walked back into it with nothing he could build on, no family left, no money, no address that wasn’t Vice Lords territory, and a man who has never been free as an adult does not know how to start. What happened next took 153 days. The first thing Earl Good does when he gets out is link up with Edward Spicer.

Big Spicy, a man with a history of sexual offense convictions who is by every available account a more dangerous person than Earl Good has been up to this point. This is July 1975. This is day one. There is no transfer slip for what happens next. Just a calendar. For 153 days, Earl Good is on parole. Technically free, technically still under state supervision, a parole officer reporting conditions, the permanent threat of revocation, but not behind a fence.

For the first time in his adult life, the only structures available to him are the ones that have always been available, the crew, the corners, the logic of men who have been inside and come back out with nothing to show for it. No employment record, no savings, no family address that doesn’t belong to someone already dead.

The Vice Lords are not a choice he makes so much as a gravitational field he never escaped. The Executioner Vice Lords had emerged in the late 1960s out of 16th and Lawndale. Good was a senior member of this faction upon release of particularly violent crew whose name described exactly what the police kept finding at their crime scenes.

October 7th, 1975, 3910 South Calumet, the Douglas neighborhood, South Side, Chicago. Someone had tipped them off. A 73-year-old blind man who kept large sums of cash in his apartment. Someone in that community gave up a vulnerable old man for a cut of the take, and that person has never been publicly named. What is documented is what happened next.

Good and Spicer went to the apartment and beat the man to death with a pistol. They took over $1,000. Over $1,000 for a man’s life. A man who had done nothing except keep his savings where he thought they were safe in his own home in the dark where he always lived. Arrest warrants were not issued after the Calumet murder.

 The case did not close on them immediately, so they kept going. November 10th, 1975, the Wonder Inn Tavern, 330 North Pulaski at Carroll West Garfield Park. A Schlitz beer delivery driver walked in during the robbery. Good and Spicer forced patrons to put their wallets on the pool table, then herded four men into the back room and shot them execution style.

Two died, two survived. The Schlitz driver had seen their faces. He identified them to police. Arrest warrants were issued this time. Good and Spicer fled Chicago. They were heading south and east toward a city that was already disappearing. East St. Louis in 1975 was a city in severe economic collapse, widespread job loss as the meatpacking plants, aluminum smelters, and rail yards that had built shut down or left population bleeding out decade after decade, the tax base gone.

Near entirely black, near entirely abandoned by the industries and institutions that had once given it a reason to exist. What stayed was the geography, the river on one side, the highway on the other, no way out that didn’t require money or a car or somewhere specific to go. It was the kind of city where two men with warrants out of Chicago could disappear because disappearing was something East St.

 Louis had been practicing for years. November 13th, Good and Spicer case the Leading Food Store, checked the mirrors, looked for a burglar alarm. They spent two days watching the place before they moved. November 15th, 1975. The Leading Food Store, East St. Louis. Ben Siegel and Emmanuel Ukman were behind the counter.

 Officer Bruce Moore responded. Spicer shot Moore in the neck from approximately 10 ft. Moore survived. At trial, he testified, “I looked directly at the subject and he fired a shot. I was looking directly down the barrel. It was that close.” Siegel and Ukman did not survive. Good and Spicer fled to the home of James Phillips, divided the stolen money in the basement.

When police arrived at Phillips’ door, they went out the back down an alley to a filling station, paid a cab driver $50 to drive them to St. Louis. $50 to a cab driver. They flew back to Chicago under aliases because they were afraid a bus would be stopped at a checkpoint. These are not the moves of men who think they’re going to get away.

 These are the moves of men who know it’s over and are trying to buy one more day. December 3rd, 1975. Earl Good was arrested in Chicago. Edward Spicer was arrested separately in Michigan shortly afterward. Five people, 39 days, a blind man on South Calumet, two men in the back room of a tavern on Pulaski, two store owners behind the counter of a grocery store in a city the country had already written off.

What belongs to those five people’s families is not the narrator’s to claim. What can be named is the arc of man released from prison in July with nothing who by December had killed five people across three neighborhoods, Chicago’s South Side, the West Side, and East St. Louis, all of them in Illinois, and whose last free address was a basement in East St.

 Louis where he counted stolen cash while the police knocked on the door upstairs. There are documents in the trial record of the Spicer case that tell you more about this story than any newspaper article did. One of them is a signed statement. The man who signed it was named James Phillips. He was the getaway driver, and when he got to the witness stand, he disclosed something the court had to stop and process. He could not read.

Phillips had given a statement to East St. Louis police on November 15th, 1975, the day of the murders. He named Good and Spicer. He claimed they had threatened to kill his children if he didn’t drive. At trial, he received immunity. He still refused to testify citing fear of gang retaliation and was found in contempt.

 When he was finally sworn in and asked about the statement, he admitted signing it but disclosed that he could not read it. The document had never been read back to him before he signed. His own attorney waived cross-examination. There was nothing to cross-examine him on because the thing he had signed was already in evidence and he had already admitted he did not know what it said.

 A transfer slip, a signed confession, two pieces of paper that moved a person from one place to another without requiring the person to understand what was happening to them. Earl Good knew both kinds. The Illinois Supreme Court ultimately ruled that admitting Phillips’ statement had been improper but harmless.

Officer Bruce Moore’s direct identification of Spicer at the scene was decisive. The conviction held. Earl Good did not go to trial. He pleaded guilty to the murder counts in St. Clair County. The remaining counts were dismissed on the prosecutor’s motion. He received a sentence of 90 to 180 years. Earl Good was 28 years old.

 90 to 180 years. The state of Illinois did its final accounting and arrived at a number that means one thing, this person does not leave. The transfer slips will keep coming institution to institution, cell to cell, but none of them will ever point toward a door that opens onto a street. Menard Correctional Center sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Chester, Illinois.

Maximum security. It is where Illinois sends the men it has given up on, not the men it is still trying to correct, the men it has sentenced past any reasonable horizon. Earl Good was sent there after sentencing. He would stay for several years. In 1979, while at Menard, Good was photographed with the leader [clears throat] from a rival gang faction, an image that appeared in Carbondale area newspapers alongside reporting on gang conditions and prisoner treatment at the facility.

A man from one side of a war sitting with a man from the other side before the formal alliance structures between those factions had calcified. Good had by then become known within the prison as someone who worked across gang lines on issues of prisoner treatment. That required a specific kind of credibility, the kind that only comes from being trusted by people who had every reason not to trust each other.

None of this undoes what happened in 1975. That is not what this is about. In the early 1980s, Earl Good decided he no longer wanted to be a Vice Lord. He requested a transfer to separate himself from the gang population. He had spent his entire life being moved by other people’s paperwork. This time, he filled it out himself.

That is the one transfer in a life full of transfer slips that Earl Good authored. Every other slip was signed by a court, a warden, a case worker, a judge. This one was his. What drove that decision? Exhaustion? Conviction? Something else? The record does not say. What is documented is the behavior. By the early 1990s, he had fully disassociated from gang life and was eventually moved to a lower security facility.

 What he thought about the people he killed is not in any public record. What exists are parole hearing statements, institutional documents about personal change, disassociation, remorse, the kind of statement you make to a board that decides whether you leave. He left that. He did not leave anything for the public record, which may be the most honest thing about him.

 The Chicago Parental School is gone. Northeastern Illinois University is there now on Foster Avenue on the same 50 acres. Earl Good outlasted the first institution that tried to fix him. He outlasted most of them. St. Charles is still operating under a different name. Menard is still operating. The pipeline is still operating.

 The transfer slips are still being filled out for boys in North Lawndale who won’t stay where they’re supposed to be. What changed is not the infrastructure. What changed is that Earl Good stopped moving through it because there was nowhere left to send him. The last public record places Earl Good at Illinois River Correctional Center in the mid-2020s, age 76.

 No transfer slip to somewhere else. No public death record. Just a man at the end of a very long number in a cell downstate at the outer edge of what the institutional file can tell you. We do not know why he was called mongoose. No public record explains the origin of the nickname. It appears in every source across 50 years without explanation.

 His mother is gone. His siblings are gone. The name outlasted the people most likely to know. Some things end without a reason on record, which is maybe the most honest way a story can close. What we have is the paper trail. Transfer slips, a court record, an IDOC number, a max out date of 2058, a 1979 photograph of him sitting with a gang leader from the other side of a war in a maximum security facility on a bluff above the Mississippi, both of them trying to make something livable out of a place designed to hold them until they

stop being anyone’s problem. That is the document. That is what the paper trail gives you. The question the paper trail doesn’t answer, whether the boy from North Lawndale ever had a path that didn’t end here, is not in any file. Nobody filled out that form. It is the one transfer the system never processed. The last documented address is a cell number.